A Napster clone from Microsoft?

Rumour has it that Microsoft is working on a peer-to-peer sharing project code-named Farsite.

The concept behind Farsite is a serverless file system - files are stored on a distributed network of clients with no centralized server or hierarchy.

"We know that (PC) disks aren't full today and machines are idle most of the time. Disks are getting bigger faster than files are. If you could build a centralized file server, it would be more reliable and it wouldn't require centralized administration," Bolosky explained.

Napster and other peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing software are built on a similar premise, but with one key difference, Bolosky said.

"Napster does have a central directory. Only its file store is peer-to-peer," he said.